Dating : The Price of Love in the City of the Dead

With the stony streets sunken below modern ground level and no trees in sight, the ruins of Pompeii quickly turn into an oven. Water faucets provide temporary relief. I ducked my head under one, letting my ball cap soak up the cool liquid.

“Oh God,” J said, rolling her eyes in embarrassment.

Downhill, sand between the paving stones had turned to mud, and fat-bodied red hornets had excavated burrows in the cracks. Tragedy never stops being tragic, but time softens its sting. For those who survived it, Pompeii’s destruction was a defining event, a catastrophe never to be forgotten.

But it was forgotten. Eventually, even Rome fell, and Pompeii was lost until an 18th-century construction project brought it to light. Now the dead lie in glass cages, their featureless faces frozen by plaster poured into the cavities of hardened ash their vanished corpses left behind.

“Where are the bodies?” an American woman asked as J and I passed by. Bright jewels of water dripped from the brim of my cap as I bent over her map to point the way. How Pompeiians had sex and how they died. That’s what we most want to know.

And life goes on, emerging bright and angry even from the cracked pavement of a dead city. Cities and civilizations, just like people, have their time to bloom and to die. The people of Pompeii worried about their elections, the price of bread, the price of sex, and the vagaries of commerce. Until one bright day, a shattering convulsion of the earth swept all of that away.